In an era of real-world loneliness, 'Pluribus' shows the price of a life of ease

Both creator Vince Gilligan and Apple TV have been cagey about revealing what Gilligan's new show Pluribus is actually about. What feels fair to reveal is that Rhea Seehorn, so brilliant as Kim in Gilligan's Better Call Saul, stars as Carol Sturka, a defiant misanthrope plagued by bristly self-loathing who suddenly finds herself feeling very much alone in the world.

How this happens: remember that long before Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, he wrote for The X-Files, where he was responsible for some of the show's weirdest and funniest episodes, as well as some of its most moving and sad. He loves science fiction at least as much as he loves drug dealers and petty sleazeballs, and Pluribus is indeed not confined to the surly bonds of Earth. One of the first visuals is of enormous satellite dishes tracking the skies, and one of its first settings is an Army installation.

You should discover the details for yourself, but roughly halfway through the first episode, there is an event — no, let's say there's an Event — and Carol is confronted by a crowd of people who blankly announce, "We just want to help, Carol" in unison. (This does not help Carol.) By the end of that episode, she is at home, alone, devastated and terrified. A man in a suit talks to her through her TV, saying she's going to be fine and she shouldn't worry (which does not help her not worry) because soon enough, "you can join us." Who is "us"? Well ... again, the show is called Pluribus.

Vince Gilligan's genius is in the deft way he marbles brutality, humanity and humor into a single creation in which each element retains its punch, but the whole still makes sense. Pluribus is a brutal watch as Carol finds herself deep in grief, walking through empty buildings, driving deserted neighborhoods, experiencing the arid desolation of a frictionless life. Without its humor, Pluribus might be too sad and too lonely to enjoy, but while Carol is isolated inside her own strange new world, her reactions are so funny and so human that she's very, very easy to attach to as a character.

The show becomes a fascinating examination of loneliness. But even beyond that, Pluribus has a philosophical frankness that is more refreshing than didactic. After all, whatever this force is that's now occupying the space where every person Carol has ever known used to be, it is so pacifying and so cooperative that it offers her whatever she wants. Food? Whatever she needs can be brought to her door. A car? She can take any one she wants. A plane, a mansion, a gas station pump turned on, a shuttered business reopened, some help with a grueling physical task? Of course, of course. Pick up the phone, and we'll do it. We just want to help, Carol. Carol is presented with a very real tension between "freedom" in the sense of self-determination and "freedom" in the sense of getting whatever you want all the time.

If all this is not enough, Gilligan remains one of the best visual stylists in television. Much of Pluribus takes place in his now-signature location of Albuquerque, and his reverence for its skies, its mountains, and its red dust has not changed. For all that television is a writers' medium, it feels impossible to imagine Carol based in Chicago or Florida or the Pacific Northwest. There's a poignancy in her huge physical world, the breadth of the open sky and the roads that stretch endlessly into the horizon, contrasted with the shrinking of her emotional life down to a single "relationship" with this force she does not understand.

Pluribus can be bracing and hard to watch, but in the end, it is a story about the preciousness of individuals, and in that sense, it may just be substantially less bleak than it initially appears.